Learning How To Play Guitar

Because our annual Diwali party is around the corner. We ended up with a keyboard, a drum set and four guitars. Everyone was keen on learning how to play guitar-or just waste a few work hours!

A few sincere employees looked up Web sites to learn guitar. And a story was born…

Learn from someone

First of all, get your hands on a guitar, beg, borrow or steal is our motto-no compromises with a passion like music. Good thing that we had guitars coming out of our ears this month.

The next step is to find someone who knows something about guitars. Easier said than done! You could choose to sign up for classes, but this involves money. We'll stick to asking one of your friends or colleagues for help in their free time. After all, it's generally when you see someone playing an instrument that you get the urge to learn!

The few people who had the determination to learn at work just kept bugging the maestros to show them a few tricks. The snag here is that when you're free to learn, the other is generally too busy to teach!

Time taken: It's hard to get exact time limits here, but let's just say it's a lot more than a few hours of waiting.

Learning from real people has the advantage of being able to ask questions, and since we're all individuals, our questions may differ. We found that getting a question answered was much easier when face to face with a real teacher. Also, people seemed to learn faster this way.

Total Time Taken: A few hours of practise; many more chasing the teachersCost: Nothing (not counting the cost of treating your friends to coax them to teach you)

Learn from the computer

Honestly, there's no difference here. You still need a guitar!

The true tech way is to hit Google and search for sites or software that will teach you for free. A few e-books wouldn't hurt either. Just make sure they're not pirated e-books in the PDF format, or you could land yourself in trouble! Luckily, we found that several sites offer free basic guitar lessons.

We decided the first step to learning guitar was to get to know the chords-a collection of musical notes form chords when played together. For this we needed a visual depiction of the actual chord being played, and an easy way to find all possible chords. We stumbled across www.chordfind.com, which tells you how to play every chord in the book. Time taken: 15 minutes of Googling

With the advantage of learning at your own pace, the tech way seems a lot better, until you come to a standstill when you just cannot understand something! For instance, our beginners could see which strings needed to be pressed, but couldn't figure out which finger was used to press which string. This help is available at https://snipurl.com /it6i/. Thank God for Google!

Total Time Taken: A few hours of searching online; many more to understand notations on sitesCost: Nothing (not considering the cost of bandwidth)

And The Winner Is...The Winner, hands down was the Old Way. Even though you may have to chase a few friends to get them to give you some of their time, it beats spending hours on Google learning less about guitar and more about how to search. Even if you are willing to spend money on this hobby, you'd be better off enrolling for classes than using some of the paid software that claims to teach you. Of the people in the office that wanted to learn, we found that the ones learning from real people learned a lot faster than the ones trying to learn on their own-case closed!